Presently, it is common for individuals or businesses to have residing within their offices a postage meter rented from a commercial business. This arrangement is very convenient, since letters may be addressed, postage applied, and mailed directly from the office without requiring an employee to physically visit the U.S. Post Office and wait in line in order to apply postage to what is often a quite significant volume of outgoing mail, or to manually apply stamps to each piece of mail.
Quite naturally, postage meters were developed to relieve the manual application of stamps on mail and to automate the above process. Nevertheless, a postage meter residing within an office is not as convenient and efficient as it may first seem to be. First, a postage meter may not be purchased, but must be rented. The rental fees alone are typically not insignificant. For a small business, this can be quite an expense to incur year after year. Second, a postage meter must be adjusted, serviced and replenished manually; e.g., each day the date must be adjusted manually, periodically the stamp pad must be re-inked, and when the amount of postage programmed within the postage meter has expired, the postage in the meter must be replenished. To be replenished, a postage meter must be manually unplugged, placed into a special case (the meter is of a significant weight), and an employee must visit a U.S. Post Office to have the meter reprogrammed with additional postage. Upon arrival at the U.S. Post Office, a teller must cut the seal, replenish the meter with a desired amount of postage, and reseal the meter before returning it to the employee. The meter must then be returned to the office and powered up.
Thus, in addition to the monthly rent, the servicing and replenishing of the meter requires the time and expense of at least one employee to take the meter to the U.S. Post Office to have it replenished. Of course, this procedure results in down-time wherein the postage meter is not available to the business for the application of postage to outgoing mail. In addition, because of the monthly rent and the size of these devices, it is generally not practical for businesses to have more than one postage meter to alleviate this down-time.
Another type of meter, offered at slightly more expense, works in the following manner: 1) a user sets up an account with the meter owner, 2) 7 to 10 days before a user requires more postage, the user deposits with the meter owner the amount of postage required, 3) the user then calls the owner (7 to 10 days later) and they issue instructions as to the manual pushing of a variety of buttons on the meter (programming) which will replenish the postage amount on the meter. Nonetheless, the meter must be taken to the Post Office every 6 months for servicing in order to detect any tampering.
Lastly, there is nothing inherent in the postal meter system which inhibits fraud. Accordingly, there may be a considerable amount of revenues lost for a postal service, or other item shipping service provider, before meter fraud is detected.
An alternative to the above mentioned postage meters available to a business, especially a small business, is to forego the advantages of a postage meter and to buy sheets, or books, of stamps. Without a doubt, this is not a sufficient solution. Since a variety of denominations of stamps are generally required, applying two 29.cent. stamps to a letter requiring only 40.cent., will begin to add up over time. Additionally, it is difficult for a business to keep track of stamp inventories and stamps are subject to pilferage and degeneration from faulty handling. Moreover, increases in the postal rate (which seem to occur roughly every three years) and the requirement for variable amounts of postage for international mail, makes the purchase of stamps even more inefficient and uneconomical.
Because of different postage zones, different classes of mail, different postage required by international mail and the inefficiency of maintaining stamps within an office, it is important to have an automatic postage system, such as the aforementioned inefficient and relatively expensive postage meter.
Moreover, there may be a variety of item shipping or delivery service providers, each of which requires payment for pick-up, transportation, and/or delivery of items according to different schedules and terms. Accordingly, to automate shipping of items via ones of these services may require a business to rent or purchase, and operate and maintain a variety of metering devices, or other equipment such as printers for waybills, manifests, or bills of lading, in order to have the flexibility to ship items via these various services.
Often shipping items via different services is desired due to such considerations as the availability of a particular service offered, guaranteed delivery day or time, tracking of shipped items, delivery enhancements including C.O.D., certified, or return receipt, as well as cost considerations. However, a small business may forgo the flexibility to choose a shipper based on such considerations due to the expense and complexity of implementing the infrastructure necessary to utilize the various services. Moreover, a typical casual user of shipping services will not invest the time into determining the particular shipper and/or service offered which most closely satisfies the user's needs and desires.
Additionally, the shipping service providers may be hesitant to offer or provide automated metering, or other such equipment, to less than heavy commercial users of their service due to expense, training, and support issues. Accordingly, such shipping service providers may not effectively leverage a potentially large portion of their potential market and, instead, rely on less convenient and, thus, less likely to be utilized manual and/or difficult to use methods of providing service to this portion of the market. Additionally, such systems may present fee collection problems as the shipping service providers may have to establish accounts, either prepaid or postpaid, in order to service these accounts. Postpaid accounts may introduce latencies in actually receiving payment for services already rendered in addition to the inability to collect for some services rendered. Prepaid accounts, although alleviating risks involved with collecting fees for services already rendered and latencies in receiving payment, introduces costs in handling such accounts.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method that provides the automatic placement of postage or other proof of payment or obligation to make payment for services, i.e., conducting a credit transaction without deducting a value from a credit balance (credit transaction), associated with item shipping/delivery on mail and other items at locations other than a U.S. Post Office or other shipping service provider, while not requiring the use of a traditional postage meter. There is a further need in the art for such a system to provide for the placement of such proof of payment or obligation to make payment for a variety of different shipping/delivery services in order that a user may select a delivery service provider and/or particular service most advantageous to that user's needs and desires.
However, one major problem with any system in which a single apparatus is utilized in conjunction with providing accounting for fees associated with a plurality of different service providers is the maintenance of strict controls on the "filling" of the memory with value credit and/or tracking the fees to be paid authorized by the apparatus. Any such controls should have as a component the ability to create an audit trail and the ability to withstand unauthorized usage.
Another problem facing any system storing and authorizing postage or other proof of payment is that the system should optimally interface with a user friendly operating environment that is flexible and can be coupled to other programs such as a word processing or graphics program.
It is a primary object of this invention to provide a system and method to dispense postage, or other proof of payment or obligation to make payment, in a secure manner so that it can be authenticated on a piece-by-piece basis.
It is a further object of this invention to dispense postage, or other proof of payment or obligation to make payment, authorized for use with and by a variety of service providers.
Another object of the invention is allow the comparison of fees/charges as between various ones of the service providers in order to provide a user with sufficient information to select a shipping/delivery service provider and/or particular service best suited to the needs and desires of the users.
A further object of the invention is to provide a system and method which may be managed by a single service provider although providing authorized proof of payment for a variety of service providers.